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Photo Superresolution:

Improve resolution of photographs with neural nets

This project uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn how to reverse some of the blur that you get when you scale images up in size. It can also learn to reverse other functions that manipulate images: for example, it can learn to approximately reverse a "sketch" filter.

The architecture of this CNN is based on the paper: Dong, Chao, et al. "Learning a deep convolutional network for image super-resolution." Computer Vision–ECCV 2014. Springer International Publishing, 2014. 184-199.

Keras is used to create and train the CNN. It can be run on top of either Tensorflow or Theano. Training the un-blur model takes under 14 hours on a training set of 5,000 subimages

Presentation Slide Deck

Slides from my lightning talk at Metis are available here Slide deck - making better photographic prints with neural nets

CNN Architecture

cnn architecture

Installation and use

0. Install dependencies

This project requires that Keras is configured (which also requires Tensorflow or Theano), see the official site for instructions.

This project also requires OpenCV 3, which can be painful to install. I recommend installing Anaconda python and then doing the following:

conda create -n superresolution numpy scipy scikit-learn flickrapi python=2.7
source activate superresolution
conda install -c https://conda.binstar.org/menpo opencv3

Finally, create a file called secrets.py with your flickr API information, used for the image scraping in downloader.py:

secrets.py

KEY = 'asdfghjkl345BlahBlahBlah'
SECRET = 'qweertyuiop123BlahBlahBlah

1. Configuration

First, set up your configuration in config.py. The most important things you will have to change is the directory names (ending in _DIR). Make these directories if they do not already exist, otherwise you'll get an error.

2. Obtaining training images

The neural net needs clean images to train on. Download natural images from flickr with downloader.py:

  1. First obtain URLs of (by default, they will be saved to flickr_face_urls.txt)

    python downloader.py --save_urls --tags['face','portrait','people']

  2. Then download the images and generate 33x33 pixel subimages (aka patches). The CNN requires input of fixed size, so it works on one 33x33 pixel subimage at a time.

    python downloader.py --download --gen_patches

3. Training

Run train_convnet.py to load up the image patches for the selected mode for a given number of epochs and a given batch size (all of this is specified in config.py). On an Amazon AWC EC2 g2.2xlarge instance, it takes 14 hours to converge but decent results can be obtained in around 6 hours or so.

At then end of each epoch, the weights will be saved in .h5 format, so that you can resume from any point.

4. Deblurring images

Finally with the training done, run

python process_img.py --input path/to/input_img.png --output path/to/output_img.png

Try python process_img.py --help for more options.

5. (Just for fun) Visualize the filters learned in the first layer

Assuming your model is named "convnet00", run python visualize_filters.py. This will generate 64 images corresponding to the convolutional filters learned in the first layer of the neural net. It will also apply the filters I found there are edge detectors, a gaussian blur (#23), translation operations (eg #62 and #63), and other interesting stuff.

My learned filters

Other Modes

  • The "deblur" mode is used to reverse the blurring that occurs when images are upscaled with bicubic interpolation.
  • In addition to the "deblur" mode, there is a "sketch" mode which converts line drawings to greyscale renderings. Specify its use in config.py.